Benefitting from business process management
The only constant in business, private or public, is Change; and most people whether they admit it or not do not like change enacted upon them. It is therefore important as you approach designing and implementing a Continuous Improvement (CI) programme that you fully recognise and manage the change aspects. Continuous improvement is not a new concept, well promoted in manufacturing businesses; it requires intensive teamwork with team members that have the delegated responsibility to improve the processes they are part of.
Leadership is key in selling the vision of the future beyond the proposed improvements and designing a reward and recognition scheme that has a personal dimension to it. Change Management is multi-dimensional including education and training, business process modelling, and communications. All of these elements are then designed to match the organisational culture.
External Intervention and facilitation can be effective, in challenging the status quo, providing analysis tools and programme management; but sustainability can only be achieved from within and enthusiastic participation can only be guaranteed if the process is enjoyable.
Making this process enjoyable requires that you ensure that each of the participants:
- Has a sense of control over the outcome.
- Understand their personal benefit.
- See how they will improve their skills making them more employable inside or outside the organisation.
- Receive recognition of their achievements through the monitoring of benefits and the difference the change has made.
Why does this make it enjoyable?
Firstly, if you can see and feel in control of your own destiny you are more likely to participate in changing it. This means leaders need to be able to project a vision of where they think continuous improvement is going to take the business, and then what part the participants will play in it. Leaders also need to emphasise and promote the personal benefits such as training as well as monetary rewards.
For example demonstrating that by participating in programmes such as this so they can progress within the business and in some cases this progression might be significant enough that they move out of the business into a new career. Sustainability requires that the business:
- Provides a strategic framework in which continuous improvement is managed through process improvement targets set over a 3-5 year period.
- Provides for the monitoring of these targets as part of departmental ‘business as usual’ activities.
- Continues to provide training in analysis, communication and decision making skills perhaps using the early practitioners to develop others.
- Communicates regularly describing how the business is progressing and the contribution from CI.
What are the key elements of a successful CI programme?
We consider the corner stone to be a dynamic business process model. By understanding the present maturity of the processes, comparing to best practice provides the ‘Gap’ that must be closed by the CI programme. We debate process performance in a qualitative manner in cross-functional workshops. The maturity of these processes will vary and this will lead to different categories of improvement such benchmarking, step change and break through.
When redesigning processes we take into account that different processes have different values within the business, therefore there should be little discussion about streamlining activities and removing rework from back office processes and can be set to a ‘best practice’ standard; whereas ‘added value’ processes need careful design to ensure we deliver the most beneficial outcome
The benefits model of the continuous improvement programme will directly be related directly to these processes also. Executive workshops enable senior managers to define the type of benefit and the degree of difficulty to achieve it. We use 3 categories Displaced Costs, Improved Productivity and Increased Revenue; and three degrees of difficulty High, Medium and Low to enable mangers to allow for the level of control they have in implementing the process improvement. This qualitative method engages managers better than traditional single target benefit measures.
Throughout a CI programme a significant level of honest communication is required, all stakeholders need to be understood and communication will vary from results notification to visioning. All the communicators will need to have a good level of skill and be able to address their work colleagues and senior managers in equal measure.
This ability requires structured training and to ensure good ‘internalisation’ of change we use workshops to engage the change agent in all participants; other skills training will include the ability to communicate with colleagues, facilitate workshops and present analysis and assessment results to senior managers. The senior manager’s role in this is to be listening, facilitating and mentoring, guiding; not managing and implementing.
In Summary
Throughout the next 12 months we will be looking at some of these techniques and approaches in more detail, but in conclusion the implementation and management of a successful continuous improvement programme requires good planning, a shared vision of the future, skilled internal change agents and extensive open communication.
We hope that we have shown that the human element is the key issue in the whole process; take your staff with you. In addition do not think you can delegate the whole process to outside agencies though they can help to provide tools and techniques and create initial momentum. For example there are many examples of where a change have been made without performing business modelling and in some cases this has resulted in extremely effective, short term cost reductions in head count, but an inability to perform the processes effectively after the programme stops.
Finally CI should be seen as redirecting your resources to add more value in activities that you may not be able to perform effectively because they are either not recognised, there is not enough resource in the business to do them or they are being protected by departmental approaches to process design and management that are ineffective in today’s agile business climate.
Rod Horrocks
CEO and Founder
H3 Partners Ltd
Tel: +44 (0) 777 211 4896
Tel: +44 (0) 845 118 0072
rod@h3partners.co.uk
